paul jenkins
What Are You Reading?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #50
Hello and welcome to What Are You Reading? This week our special guest is Ross Campbell, creator of Shadoweyes and its recent sequel, Shadoweyes in Love, as well as Wet Moon, Water Baby, The Abandoned and “Refuse,” a short story in the recent Strange Adventures anthology from Vertigo.
To see what Ross and the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click below.
Jenkins and Ramos’ FairyQuest finally makes its way to the U.S.
After years of waiting, Humberto Ramos had to take it into his own hands to bring his European graphic novel FairyQuest to America.
After initial plans to go through an un-named publisher fell through, Ramos has decided to self-publish the book in an extremely limited edition of 1000 at this year’s Comic-Con International at San Diego. Created with long-time collaborator Paul Jenkins, FairyQuest was released in Europe almost three years ago, but the duo couldn’t find the right publisher to bring it to the states.
Although best known now for his work on Amazing Spider-Man, Ramos has done numerous creator-owned projects such as Crimson and Out There at DC/Wildstorm, and even an earlier European series called K.
The sneak peeks over the years have kept my motor running, and I’m glad come July I’ll finally be able to get my hands on Ramos’ rarest work.
Bill Sienkiewicz reveals his side of Alan Moore’s Big Numbers saga
from Big Numbers #3 by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz
It is perhaps the greatest comic never published. Intended to be a 12-issue miniseries ambitious and complex enough to make Watchmen look like Wizard of Id on an off day, Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz’s Big Numbers was a Joycean look at life in a small English town as a big-box retailer prepared to set up shop. But this grand fiction-as-fractal-geometry experiment only managed to produce two published issues in 1990 before hitting a massive delay during work on issue #3, losing Sienkiewicz, moving from Moore’s Mad Love publishing imprint to Kevin Eastman’s Tundra, tapping Sienkiewicz’s then-teenaged assistant (and current reclusive Pim & Francie creator and alt-horror superstar) Al Columbia to take over, losing Columbia and all the pages he’d completed, and finally shuddering to a halt.
The Fifth Color – What About Bob?
The Sentry has come a long way, baby. Bob Reynolds’s story is no longer a man struggling with an addiction who was close to his dog, he’s just about as far from that as possible. The original April Fool’s Prank for The Golden Guardian of Good turned out to be a larger tale of a man with the greatest amount of power having the greatest amount of responsibility. That when you create the equal and opposite reaction to the power of a thousand exploding suns, the only way to win was to do nothing at all. At his first introduction, we are left with a very quiet and beautiful study of the greatest good and the worst evil residing in an everyday man and the world that had forgotten him.
When Bendis puled him out of the Vault for his New Avengers, the stakes had already been changed. The balance of good an evil was gone, just an implanted a virus from Mastermind and possible delusion villain The General that created psychological problems and the existence of the Void, which was just another extension of Reynolds himself. We lost our philosophical battle and our more peacable idea of wrong and right to be able to tear Carnage in half in space.
Okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. Bendis even brought in Paul Jenkins as a character in the book to explain everything, kind of having him sign off on the project. Despite his immense power and complexity, the Sentry was going to be an Avenger. Hey, they’ve worked with gods and demi-gods before, what’s the difference?